BizData API - An Open Alternative to Google Places

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/05/2026 à 07:30

The BizData API is a a new business search API built on OpenStreetMap data. Like the Google Places API, it allows developers to search for nearby restaurants, bars, hotels and other businesses. Unlike Google Places, however, BizData is completely free, requires no API key and no billing account.A typical BizData API request can return names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, coordinates and

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Drawing Custom Population Polygons

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/05/2026 à 08:14

Tom Forth’s Population around a Point is one of those wonderfully simple map tools that instantly invites exploration. Click anywhere on the map, choose a radius, and it estimates how many people live within that circle. Under the hood, it uses the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) population grid for 2024, querying population points stored in a massive SQLite database.Now

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The New Era of American Migration

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 15/05/2026 à 11:38

Last month, CORRECTIV released an interactive map, Where Europe’s Population is Shrinking, which visualizes Europe's general pattern of rural depopulation and the subtle trends of where European towns and regions are growing or shrinking.In the United States, you can explore similarly detailed population trends on cinyc’s 2025 Town Population Change map. This visualization tracks

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15 Minute Europe

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 14/05/2026 à 09:37

The 15 Minute City Score Europe Map shows how easy it is for people in European cities to reach everyday services - such as shops, schools, healthcare, parks, and public transport - within a 15-minute walk. Each colored dot on the map represents a small neighborhood-sized area. The color of the dot reflects that area’s “15 Minute City Score”: darker or warmer colors mean residents can

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METs Do the Time Warp Again

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/05/2026 à 07:51

NYC Commute POV takes the familiar geography of New York and stretches it into something far more emotionally accurate: a city shaped by time rather than distance.Inspired by classic transit cartograms, the map reimagines New York according to subway accessibility. Midtown Manhattan shrinks into a compact, hyper-connected core, while transit deserts balloon outward into distorted peripheries.

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Mapping 1,000s of Bike Trips Every Day

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 12/05/2026 à 07:30

The TfL cycle hire scheme has more than 12,000 bikes and 800+ docking stations across London. On average around 30,000 bicycle journeys a day are made using Transport for London’s Santander Cycles scheme - although on busy summer days the number of journeys can exceed 50,000 hires a day. Every one of those journeys leaves behind a small trail of data and London Cycle Hire turns that data into a

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Telling the Time with Street View

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 11/05/2026 à 07:40

Back in 2024 media artist Yufeng Zhao fed more than 8 million Google Maps Street View panoramas into a machine learning model that identifies and transcribes visible text. The result was All Text in NYC - a searchable archive of 138 million snippets of urban lettering gathered from graffiti, storefronts, bumper stickers, menus, flyers, billboards, and more. A search engine that turned the whole

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Trump II: The Debt Star Strikes Back

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/05/2026 à 08:09

With US public debt officially eclipsing 100% of GDP for the first time since the 1940s, the Trump administration is pivoting toward “high-impact” funding. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Department of War. Yesterday, the search for “little green men” took a giant leap forward with the release of “files related to alien and extraterrestrial life.”The release marks the debut of the

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When London Was on the Equator

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 08/05/2026 à 08:23

Trafalgar Square 320 million years ago If I could travel back in time to around 320 million years ago (about 318 million years before the first humans appeared) I would find the ground beneath my London home lying some 6 degrees south of the equator. Because of the slow movement of Earth’s tectonic plates over immense spans of time, the land I stand on today once occupied a latitude roughly

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Keyboard Free Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/05/2026 à 07:28

Map Gesture ControlsAlexFor most of us interactive maps are controlled with a mouse, a trackpad or touch gestures. However, some developers are exploring alternative ways to navigate maps without ever touching a keyboard or screen.Non-keyboard controls could prove especially useful for accessibility, allowing people with limited mobility to interact with maps more easily. Two recent

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Map Cam Selfie

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/05/2026 à 08:43

Map Cam Selfie If you’ve ever looked at a map of the United States and thought, "This would look better if it were a mosaic of my own face," then you’re in luck. You can now use Map Cam Selfie to superimpose your face on top of of the USA using the 3,000+ counties of the US as individual pixels for a live webcam feed.What is it?Map Cam Selfie is a browser-based experiment built using MapLibre

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Mapping the Jet Stream

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/05/2026 à 08:44

Ever since Cameron Beccario’s Earth.nullschool.net animated wind map was first released back in 2014 the 'particle flow map' aesthetic has become the gold standard for meteorological visualization. There is something inherently captivating about watching thousands of flowing particles trace the invisible currents of our atmosphere. Now, Netweather has joined the fray with their

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The World is Your Canvas

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/05/2026 à 06:56

DrawonMaps is a fascinating new interactive map that turns urban infrastructure into an artistic medium. The premise is simple but technically impressive: you upload an image, and the map colors the city’s road network to recreate that image.How it WorksThe app leverages a modern stack - React 19, Deck.gl, MapLibre, and the Overpass API - to bridge the gap between image processing and geospatial

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Marble Madness

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/05/2026 à 08:23

My new map, the Terrain Marble Simulator, allows you to drop a digital marble anywhere in the world and watch it find its way home - or at least to the bottom of the nearest valley.How it Works: Physics in the BrowserThe simulator is built on MapLibre GL JS, utilizing a custom physics engine that runs in real-time within your browser. When you click the map, the application identifies your

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The Interstellar Travel Planner

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 01/05/2026 à 08:01

Have you ever woken up aboard an interstellar spacecraft with no idea how long it will take to get home to Earth? Then you need the Interstellar Map.This impressive browser-based visualization combines a 3D map of nearby stars with a relativistic travel-time calculator, allowing you to explore the practical consequences of planned journeys across interstellar space. The map plots thousands of

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Tracking & Mapping Private Cars in Real-Time

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 30/04/2026 à 06:57

OpenTrafficMap is a real-time animated map showing the movements of cars, trams and buses in Graz, Austria. It also shows the current status of all the city's smart traffic lights - displaying whether signals are red or green.What is OpenTrafficMap? Modern vehicles and road infrastructure increasingly use C-ITS (Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems), a wireless standard designed to improve

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Every Solar Eclipse This Century

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 29/04/2026 à 08:20

I’ve just discovered that my brother's house is right in the sweet spot for a total solar eclipse in August. Almost immediately afterwards I discovered that my mother has already bagged his spare room for the occasion.My solar eclipse discovery was made thanks to the Solar Eclipse Map, a smart new interactive tool that helps you explore the paths of every solar eclipse visible between 1900 and

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Historical GeoGuesssr

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/04/2026 à 07:55

WenWare is a fun, time-travel twist on GeoGuessr. The hook? You aren’t just guessing your location - you’re guessing the date.The game drops you into AI-generated panoramas of famous historical events, asking you to identify both the “where” and the “when.”Sounds simple enough, right? In practice, however, the game’s success feels tied to the modern era. While the Modern period features

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Is Your Home Too Close to a Road?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/04/2026 à 06:39

I live in a Victorian terrace in London where the houses lack front gardens, leaving my sitting room wall less than 10 feet from the road. While my street is quiet, this proximity to the curb makes noise pollution a constant threat in busier areas. To visualize this urban reality, OSM House to Street offers an interactive map that calculates the exact distance between building exteriors and the

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The World is Your Canvas

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 25/04/2026 à 08:35

Pixtera is a brand new browser-based collaborative pixel art map that turns the whole world into a shared canvas. Built on MapLibre and OpenStreetMap data, it lets users zoom into real locations and start drawing directly onto the map in pixel form.New players begin with 100 free pixels in their energy store, which can be placed on the map one by one. Used pixels gradually regenerate at a

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Creating a Global Disco

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/04/2026 à 09:07

In February I experimented with ways to bring extruded buildings to life on a map using a range of visual effects. My Polygon Effects map focused on a single building, which lights up, oscillates, and changes color to create a series of animated displays.Rainbow now takes this idea worldwide. Zoom to almost any location on the Rainbow map and you can watch extruded 3D buildings pulse in

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Data as Art

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/04/2026 à 08:20

Yesterday I visited the new V&A museum at East Bank. In all honestly I was more impressed with the museum building than the actual exhibits but - for obvious reasons - I was drawn to Aaron Koblin's Flight Patterns visualization. Aaron Koblin's Flight Patterns BTW - if the V&A want me to curate an exhibition of Data Art I am always available: earth :: a global map of wind

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Where Europe Is Emptying

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 22/04/2026 à 07:43

CORRECTIV’s latest story map, Where Europe’s Population is Shrinking, is a superb example of how large-scale spatial data and clear visual design can come together to tell a nuanced geographic story. In this case, the story is one of Europe’s rural depopulation and how emigration and demographic decline have reshaped entire regions since the end of the Cold War.The map draws on newly harmonised

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Address to Impress

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/04/2026 à 07:38

There are already loads of online tools available to help you create your own map posters. Many of these, such as Mapiful and Mapness, allow you to design your poster, pay a fee, and receive a high-quality print by mail.However, you can also use these free alternatives to create and print your own customized map posters at home:Figuregrounder prettymapp MapToPoster JS

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The First Systematic Survey Meets Modern DEM

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/04/2026 à 07:05

Mapterhorn is an open-source terrain data pipeline. Its core idea is deceptively simple: take the best available open elevation datasets from around the world, normalize them, and deliver them as a single, seamless, web-ready product.From this unified dataset, Mapterhorn provides a ready-to-use map tile service designed for modern web mapping workflows. The terrain is packaged into PMTiles

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Google Night View

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/04/2026 à 08:16

To ensure the highest quality Street View imagery for navigation, Google almost exclusively captures the world in broad daylight. But as any seasoned map-nerd knows, every system has its glitches. La Noche Cíclica is a fascinating Google Map project that highlights the rare, eerie, and often accidental moments when Street View goes dark. You can view the project's documented night views simply

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Drop a Message in a Bottle

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/04/2026 à 07:54

Unstoried: Send a Message in a Bottle is a beautifully simple idea executed as a playful WebGL globe: a place where anyone can drop a virtual message into the ocean and see what drifts back from strangers around the world.Unstoried is meant to be a modern, planet-scale revival of early web guestbooks - except instead of signing a page, you cast a single bottle adrift upon a virtual 3D globe and

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what1tune - Musical Addresses

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/04/2026 à 09:25

Over the years, we’ve seen countless ways to navigate our world using various geohashing solutions. These systems - such as the popular what3words (which assigns three random words to every 3-meter square), or Google’s Plus Codes - aim to provide a simplified, human-readable way to identify precise locations where traditional street addresses fall short, such as in

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The Ebb and Flow of a City in Motion

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 15/04/2026 à 07:29

NYC Riders is a striking animated map that visualizes the 4.3 million NYC subway trips taken on an average Wednesday in September 2025. The map uses scaled circles to show trains moving on the network based on the MTA timetable. The size of the circles is determined by how many (estimated) passengers are on each train.As you watch the animation unfold, the daily rhythm of the city becomes

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Scrabble Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 14/04/2026 à 07:24

Apparently yesterday was International Scrabble Day, and to celebrate the occasion the Map Design Commission of the International Cartographic Association decided to create a Scrabble Map for its #365DaysOfMaps Campaign.Scrabble Map is a very simple but also quite addictive map game. A country is randomly selected, and players are given a scrambled set of letters. Your task? Drag and arrange

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How Livable is Your Street?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/04/2026 à 07:08

Strado is a new interactive mapping tool designed to provide objective livability scores for 50 major European cities, powered entirely by OpenStreetMap data. By clicking on any street on the Strado map, users receive a Livability Score and an Activity Score derived from an assessment of 22 different categories.How it WorksStrado analyzes the density of Points of Interest (POIs) to rank

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This Map Finds Cities Everyone Can Fly To

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 11/04/2026 à 07:50

Over the years there have been many attempts to create interactive maps that help friends discover the best place to meet - somewhere roughly equidistant from all their starting points. Tools like Whatshalfway have become popular for exactly this reason, offering a simple way to find a convenient halfway location.These tools work well if you’re walking, cycling or driving. But they quickly fall

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Legible Rude Places Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 10/04/2026 à 08:53

This morning I was browsing Gary Gale's Vaguely Rude Places map and realised that thanks to my deteriorating eye-sight I could no longer read all the hilariously rude place-names around the world. Instead of simply diving into my browser settings and magnifying the page I decided it would be far more satisfying to create my own map. Luckily for me Gary has provided links to easily download the

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11 Million Colored Buildings

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/04/2026 à 07:52

If there were an Interactive Mapping Hall of Fame, Bert Spaan’s Netherlands Building Age map would undoubtedly hold a place of honor. In 2013, Spaan achieved the monumental task of mapping 9,866,539 individual building footprints across the country. By utilizing a vibrant, data-driven color palette, he created a visual standard that not only captured the public’s imagination but also inspired a

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The Ancestry Dot Map of America

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 08/04/2026 à 08:25

Inspired by Census Dots the interactive racial dot map of the 2020 U.S. Census - the Ancestry Dot Map applies a similar visual language to a different, and arguably more nuanced, dataset: reported ancestry.Like its predecessor, the Ancestry Dot Map uses colored dots scattered across the landscape of the United States. But instead of visualizing race at the individual level, each dot here

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The World in Motion

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/04/2026 à 08:04

This animated map displays worldwide air temperatures over the past week. It illustrates how temperatures shift daily, warming progressively from east to west as the Sun rises and sets across the globe.You might also be able to spot other patterns, such as the effects of jet streams, periods of intense summer heat, and sharp temperature drops during winter when polar air moves southward.Recently

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The Politics of Street View

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/04/2026 à 07:21

I’m really bad at BallotGuessr. The object of the game is very simple: you’re shown a Street View image and have to use the visual clues to decide whether the area voted Republican or Democrat - think GeoGuessr for psephology fans.If BallotGuessr were set in the UK, I’m confident I could correctly guess how a neighbourhood votes 99% of the time. But in the U.S., I really

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200,000 Rivers Run Through It

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/04/2026 à 07:30

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has published a fascinating visualization exploring the language of rivers in the United States - a map that doesn’t just show waterways, but the words we use to describe them. Their Map that Glows with the Vocabulary of Water reveals how terms like arroyo, bayou, creek, and marsh are not randomly distributed, but instead cluster in ways that reflect the

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ASCII Mapping of Live Data

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/04/2026 à 07:46

There’s something oddly satisfying about seeing the world reduced to text. The new ASCII OSM Viewer  leans fully into that aesthetic, turning modern web mapping into something that looks like it belongs on a terminal from the 1980s.Built by Lionel Lim, this browser-based experiment takes data from OpenStreetMap and renders it entirely using ASCII characters. The result is a playful but

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Real-Time Mapping of the Moon Mission

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 03/04/2026 à 12:00

As part of NASA’s Artemis program to return humans to the Moon, Artemis II is sending four astronauts on a crewed journey around our nearest neighbor - an important step toward future lunar landings. I’m one of the many thousands of people currently hooked on NASA's Artemis II Live Mission Coverage on YouTube. It’s incredible to see live footage coming straight from the spacecraft and

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Mini London 3D

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 03/04/2026 à 00:00

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, which is why Mini Tokyo 3D cannot stop blushing right now.In 2019, Mini Tokyo 3D revolutionized the world of real-time transit mapping. By simulating Tokyo’s massive public transit system using stylized, 3D colored blocks, it allowed users to watch the city pulse in real-time.It is an aesthetic which has become much admired and replicated

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Moon Shots and Space Rot

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/04/2026 à 07:34

Artemis 2: Experience the Complete Moon Mission Here I don't usually link to paywalled maps, but I'm making an exception for Die Zeit’s extraordinary 3D scrollytelling visualization of humanity's return to the moon.Their Artemis 2 simulation is a triumph of interactive journalism. It transforms a complex, $100 billion engineering feat into a visceral, cinematic journey. For most of us, this

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Sentient Street View

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 01/04/2026 à 08:35

Sentient Street ViewSince Google first launched Street View in 2007, its mission has been simple: to provide a window into every corner of the globe - from the peaks of Mont Blanc to the depths of the Great Barrier Reef.Throughout that journey, Pegman has been your faithful, silent guide - a cursor with a purpose, but no voice of his own.But looking toward the future of mapping, Google began to

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The World is a Piano!

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 31/03/2026 à 08:27

Back in the distant mists of 2009, Andy Woodruff created Ohio is a Piano - an interactive map where the state’s 88 counties function as the 88 keys of a piano. Clicking a county on the map triggers a unique note, literally transforming the map into a playable instrument.Now, in honor of Piano Day - fittingly held on the 88th day of the year - Ian Muehlenhaus has introduced Map Melody. It’s

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The Notable People Map Game

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 30/03/2026 à 08:04

Regular readers of this blog and participants in Topi Tjukanov's annual #30DayMapChallenge will probably be familiar with Topi's Notable People map, which shows the birthplaces of famous people around the world. Over the weekend I decided to extend the concept of the notable people map by creating a notable persons game:Pin the PastThe goal of the game is simple: you’re given the name of a

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The IRL Streaming Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/03/2026 à 08:28

lucent.earth is a 'real-time visualization of global live streams and radio stations'. Which makes it sound a bit more exciting than it really is. Mapping live video streams is hardly an original concept. However, now we've entered the 'influencer age' - defined by 24-hour real-time oversharing - perhaps the time for lucent.earth has finally come. lucent.earth is essentially a 3D globe

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The Oceans of Mars and this Dammed Earth

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/03/2026 à 08:42

This interactive Mars Map includes an intriguing "ocean simulation" layer that allows you to explore how liquid water might once have carved the Martian landscape. By toggling the "ocean simulation" option in the map layers menu, an adjustment panel appears that allows you to manipulate the theoretical sea level across the planet’s unique topography. It’s a fascinating way to visualize where

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GeoGuesser - But judged by an AI

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 25/03/2026 à 08:52

In the last week, I’ve added two new daily challenges to my bookmarks. The first, Parseword, isn’t map-related at all. It’s the latest game from the inventor of Wordle, and if you like cryptic crosswords, it’s dangerously addictive.The other new addition is StreetSeekr, a fun geo-guessing-style game. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with

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The 2025 Global Climate Report

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/03/2026 à 10:20

Yesterday, the World Meteorological Organization released its 2025 State of the Global Climate report. The report confirms that last year was among the three hottest years on record, with global temperatures about 1.43 °C above the 1850-1900 average.The report includes an interactive map visualising last year’s extreme climate events - the 2025 Extreme Events Dashboard. This map

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Mapping 600 Million Years on Earth

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/03/2026 à 09:21

Esri's Dance of the Continents allows you to travel 600 million years back in time to view the Earth during the Cambrian period - when complex multicellular life first began to flourish. From there, you can scroll forward to watch the slow, rhythmic movement of tectonic plates as they shift to form the world we know today.As you move through the timeline, you’ll see the supercontinent Pangaea

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Virtual Street View Graffiti

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/03/2026 à 08:38

I Was Here is a great idea that, at least for now, doesn’t quite live up to its full potential.At its core, the app uses panoramic imagery to create virtual graffiti walls around the world. Users can select a Street View-style panorama and draw directly onto the image. Those drawings persist, meaning anyone else who visits the same panorama will see what’s been left behind. In that sense, it

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The No.1 YouTube Music Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/03/2026 à 08:50

When The Pudding launched its Cultural Borders of Song map in 2018, it offered a compelling snapshot of global music tastes. But the map stalled in 2021 - and hasn't been updated since. For a truly up-to-date view, the new Cultural Borders map delivers a live glimpse of what the world is listening to right now.Cultural Borders is an interactive map of global music trends. Click anywhere on the

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Where's Everyone Moving?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 19/03/2026 à 08:58

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans pack up and move across state lines - but where are they going, and which routes are the busiest? The US State-to-State Migration Map answers these questions by transforming annual U.S. Census migration data into a dynamic, animated visualization of how people move between states. The map reveals the country’s strongest population corridors, showing

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Search Street View for Anything!

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/03/2026 à 09:04

Back in 2024, all text in NYC, performed large-scale character recognition across every Google Maps Street View image in New York, producing a search engine that lets users find any word captured in the city’s streetscape.Now, Sean Hardesty Lewis at Cornell Tech has pushed the idea further - using vision-language AI models to build an interactive map that lets users search not just for words, but

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The Longest View on Earth

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/03/2026 à 09:56

If you stand on the summit of the Kunlun Mountains, which stretch along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in China, on a clear you should be able to see Pik Dankova - a remote peak in the Tian Shan of Kyrgyzstan - more than 530 km away. According to the All the Views map this is the longest line of sight on planet Earth.Exploring the World’s Longest Views All the Views is

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The Map That Knows Where You'll Find Love

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/03/2026 à 08:16

This is my personal astrocartography map. It supposedly shows where the different planetary energies from my birth chart are strongest. According to astrocartography enthusiasts, you can use it to help decide where to live, travel, work, or even start important life chapters.The map was created by Astrocartography AI. All I had to do was enter my date of birth and the site

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The Nuclear War Simulator

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 14/03/2026 à 08:43

At 8am this morning France launched a surprise nuclear attack on the United States.France claimed that it had no alternative but to try and bring about regime change, claiming that US leaders were 'Deranged scumbags who have been killing protestors. Thank you for your attention to this matter!'The United States responded to this unprovoked nuclear strike by launching its own nuclear weapons

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Safe Driving Directions

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/03/2026 à 09:29

Americans are very poor drivers. On average, there are 42,109 traffic fatalities each year in the United States - roughly one death every 12 minutes. If the U.S. had the same road safety record as the United Kingdom, you would expect around 8,170 deaths annually. The fact that there were 42,109 suggests that drivers in the U.S. are roughly five times more likely to die on the roads than drivers

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Simulating American Air Traffic During the 2026 World Cup

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 12/03/2026 à 10:02

Simulating Private Jet Traffic for the 2026 World Cup The aviation software company AirPlx has published an interactive map that simulates private aircraft traffic between North American airports during the 2026 FIFA World Cup.The map, titled Can Private Aviation Handle the World Cup?, models thousands of private aviation flights connecting airports in the 16 host cities across the United

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Streetonomics - All Roads Lead to Men

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 11/03/2026 à 08:57

If you’re a regular reader of Maps Mania, you know we love a good Streetonomics project - especially those that visualize the deep-seated gender gaps in our urban landscapes.The latest contribution to this field comes from Málaga, where the local newspaper Diario Sur has published a fascinating interactive map titled Only one in ten streets in Malaga has a woman's name. Using a mix of open data

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Where in the World?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/03/2026 à 09:05

Where in the World…? A GeoGuessr-Style Game for History Buffs Fans of GeoGuessr will be familiar with the addictive game-play of Where in the World: click on an interactive map to guess a location as accurately as possible. But what if, instead of deciphering road signs and landscapes, you had to rely on your knowledge of world history? That’s the premise behind Where in the World…, a simple but

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Automatic Small Multiples

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/03/2026 à 09:28

US Football StadiumI’ve been having a lot of fun playing with the XofY OSM Geometry Viewer. The viewer is a specialized web tool created by Matt Whilden that visualizes the geometries of OpenStreetMap (OSM) features in a “small multiples” layout. It allows you to compare the shapes and outlines of specific objects without the distraction of a background map. For example, above you can see the

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Archive Movie Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/03/2026 à 09:41

The Irish Film Institute has launched a fascinating interactive map exploring one of Ireland’s most distinctive cinematic time capsules: the Amharc Éireann cinema newsreels. The Archive Player Map plots 250 stories from the series across the island of Ireland, allowing users to browse the films geographically and discover how different towns, cities and landscapes appeared on cinema screens

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No Flock Cam Driving Routes

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/03/2026 à 09:04

DeFlock Flock cameras are AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. The cameras have sparked strong debate because they create a large network that records people’s movements.They:Photograph every passing vehicleRead the license plate number automaticallyIdentify vehicle details (color, make, model)Record the time and locationUpload the data to a shared cloud databaseYou

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A Small War with Global Consequences

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/03/2026 à 09:02

Ship traffic grinding to a halt in the Strait of Hormuz Real-time maps of global shipping and flight traffic have featured prominently in news coverage since the United States & Israel decided to go to war with Iran.Visualisations based on data from MarineTraffic have been widely used to show the growing number of fuel tankers anchored in the Strait of Hormuz. Following threats from

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The Trains' Bedtimes Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 03/03/2026 à 09:51

We all need our beauty sleep. Apparently, that includes trains.The delightfully nerdy Trains' Bedtimes Map visualizes the moment each part of Europe tucks its railways in for the night. Using colored hexbins, the map shows the first time after 5pm when service levels drop below 50% of peak frequency. Think of it as a continental curfew clock for trains.I think I can spot the familiar arc of the

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The Iranian Missiles Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/03/2026 à 09:03

The Iranian Missiles Map Modern missile warfare is framed as precise, calculated, and technologically controlled. But “precision” in military terms does not mean what most people think it means. After the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, Tehran retaliated by striking Israel and U.S.-linked military sites across the region, including in Gulf states that host American forces.

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This is London Calling - Discover Global Radio Mapping

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/02/2026 à 09:16

In a world where streaming platforms increasingly dominate how we discover new music, TuneJourney brings back the magic of live radio - and places it on a spinning, interactive globe.At first glance, TuneJourney feels familiar. The idea of mapping radio stations geographically isn’t new - maps like Radio Garden, TuneIn Explorer, and Radio Browser have explored similar territory. However,

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How to Create an Interactive Conceptual Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/02/2026 à 10:21

The 2026 Gorton and Denton Byelection Map In The Map of Human Happiness I reviewed a conceptual interactive map created by The Pudding to visualize the results of a 2017 research project. Here is how you can create your own conceptual maps using the Azgaar Fantasy Map Generator with the MapLibre mapping library.This project combines world-building tools with modern web mapping to create a

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The Map of Human Happiness

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/02/2026 à 08:43

The Pudding has taken the results of a 2017 research project and turned them into something much more engaging: a map of human happiness. In the original study, 10,000 people were asked to share their “happy moments.” The Happy Map transforms those responses into a visual landscape, where each moment is represented by a small person-shaped marker and grouped with similar experiences.The map is

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A Crowd Driven Journey Around the World

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 25/02/2026 à 09:18

PinTheEarth is a "collaborative digital project built by the world, one pin at a time." At its core, the site features a digital globe that connects visitors via a single, continuous string. Every time a user drops a pin, the line extends, weaving a collective journey that currently spans 3.8 million kilometers across 617 individual locations.When you share your location, a red pin is

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Isometric NYC Snow

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/02/2026 à 08:44

Isometric NYC Snow In January, a massive isometric map of New York was released. Isometric NYC is a sprawling pixel art tribute to the city, visualizing every block - from iconic skyscrapers to tucked-away corners - from a unique isometric perspective.Of course, one of the primary hurdles for any cartographer is that the world never stops moving. No sooner is a "definitive" map

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Blimp-tastic Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/02/2026 à 09:35

Last week, I released a three.js blimp map game - The Hunt for Red Octangles. In response, over the weekend, Map Channels sent me links to two fascinating projects he recently stumbled upon.mrdoob's Three.js Tokyo City Generator This vibe-coded three.js pan across a generated night-time cityscape was created using Gemini Canvas. If you want to improve the scene (or change the "

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Mapping the Carbon Footprint of the Global Grid

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/02/2026 à 10:26

In August 2025, France had a carbon intensity of 25 gCO₂eq/kWh, while Missouri was 688 gCO₂eq/kWh. In other words, Missouri has a carbon intensity about 2,652% higher than France.You can compare the carbon intensity of different regions and countries of the world for yourself using Electricity Maps. Electricity Maps is a sophisticated live visualization that tracks where your electricity comes

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Explore Your Neighborhood in Tron

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/02/2026 à 09:14

Have you ever wondered what your neighborhood would look like inside The Grid - the neon digital frontier of Tron? I decided to find out. By combining OpenStreetMap data with three.js, I transformed my local streets into a fully explorable, 3D neon world. The process was so rewarding that I integrated the Overpass API, allowing anyone to teleport to their own corner

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Explore the World with Open Sourced Street Views

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 19/02/2026 à 09:57

Nono’s Odyssey: A Lo-Fi Journey Through Open-Source Imagery Nono’s Odyssey is a refreshing map game that prioritizes exploration and discovery over direct competition. It’s an interactive tool that blends open-source street imagery with the addictive mechanics of a digital treasure hunt. As a "geo-game," it successfully shifts the objective away from the traditional "Where am I?" (the 

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Real-Time Flight Tracking is now 3D

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/02/2026 à 09:01

The next generation of flight-tracking maps has arrived! I am a huge fan of live flight-tracking maps like Flightradar24, ADS-B Exchange and FlightAware. These popular websites all show planes moving in real time on top of a 2D map. Recently Air Loom introduced the concept of a 3D air-traffic map to bring a whole new level of immersion to flight tracking. Unlike traditional flight maps, Air Loom

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Mapping the World’s Largest Human Migration

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/02/2026 à 15:08

Today, Tuesday, February 17th, 2026, marks the first day of the Lunar New Year. As we enter the Year of the Fire Horse, hundreds of millions of people across China are sitting down for reunion dinners, lighting fireworks, and celebrating the most significant date on the lunar calendar.For the Chinese people, the Spring Festival (Chunyun) isn't just a holiday; it is a cultural imperative to

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From Bargain to Bank-Breaking: The NYC Rent Heat Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/02/2026 à 09:40

New York City has never been a bargain for renters - but the latest data shows just how wide the gap has become between the city’s most and least expensive neighborhoods.At the very top of the market sits Lower Manhattan, where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is a staggering $4,928. Not far behind is North Brooklyn at $4,029, while West Queens commands an average of $3,489. Even

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The Rename the World Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/02/2026 à 08:54

The President has decided that the United States of America will henceforth be known as ‘Trumpland.’ If you were in charge of the world, what names would you give to your favorite locations?A couple of years ago, I released OpenPlacesMap (blog post link, as the map is no longer live) - an editable world map that let anyone rename locations with a click. The map was hosted on Glitch, so

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Adding a Dolly Zoom to Your Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 14/02/2026 à 09:54

This week, Andrew Sepic of Mapbox published a fascinating article on Unlocking Mapbox GL JS's Hidden Field of View Control - a technique that can dramatically change how a map feels without moving the camera at all.By manipulating the camera’s internal FOV parameter, developers can:Create a telephoto effect (narrow FOV) for architectural visualizationProduce a dramatic wide-angle

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The Most Googled Bird in America is ...

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/02/2026 à 09:25

Searching for Birds is a hugely impressive data exploration into which bird species are searched for the most on Google. By combining search data with citizen-science observations from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and eBird, the project reveals that visually striking or culturally iconic birds often dominate public curiosity. The analysis also highlights strong seasonal rhythms, with searches

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Mapping Every Ancient Site in Greece

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 12/02/2026 à 09:01

Whether you are planning a trip to Greece, researching ancient civilizations, or simply exploring the geography of the classical world, you should enjoy the Archaeological Atlas of Greece.I have a huge soft spot for historical cartography, especially when it involves rescuing data from “old-school” interfaces and making it more accessible. Which is why I’m drawn to the Archaeological Atlas

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How Indo-European Shaped Half the World

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 10/02/2026 à 09:13

Thousands of years ago, a community of people began to spread across vast stretches of Eurasia, carrying their language with them. Around 8,000 years ago, from a homeland likely located on the Pontic–Caspian steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas, these migrants moved west into Europe, east toward Central Asia, and south toward the Indian subcontinent.They spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a

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Pinning Photo History to the Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/02/2026 à 10:11

You are about to become a digital time-traveler with OpenMediaMap. There’s an undeniable nostalgic thrill in stumbling upon a century-old photograph of your own neighborhood - spotting the ghosts of buildings long gone or recognizing the outlines of streets that still exist today. By mapping vintage images, OpenMediaMap makes it possible to explore these moments geographically and experience the

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Here Grows New York

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/02/2026 à 10:04

Here Grows New York is a short film by Myles Zhang that visualizes the development of New York City’s infrastructure and street system from 1609 to the present day. The nine-minute animated film draws on geo-referenced historic maps to trace the growth of the five boroughs from the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam through the Industrial Revolution and into the modern era.The animated film shows

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The Flight Sim Globe

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/02/2026 à 09:49

Flight Tracker Demo | Source on GitHub Flight Tracker is an impressive Three.js project that simulates global air traffic in real time. While the visualization is currently powered by simulated flight data, the developer has indicated plans to integrate real-time feeds in the future. For now, if you are interested in real-time flight tracking maps you can view Flightradar24 and

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Polygon Map Effects

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/02/2026 à 17:39

I'm not sure how useful this is - but I had a lot of fun creating it.Polygon Effects is an interactive 3D map that brings simple extruded polygons to life with a variety of visual effects. The map shows a single building made of stacked floors, each represented as a polygon. As you watch, each floor can light up, oscillate, or change color to create different animated effects.The animations are

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The Fallout - Vault-Tec Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/02/2026 à 10:17

Step Inside the Wasteland with Amazon’s Fallout Explorer To promote the latest season of Fallout, Amazon has released a beautifully designed interactive map that invites fans to explore the world of the show. Presented in the franchise’s distinctive retro-futuristic aesthetic, the map feels like it has been lifted straight from a Vault-Tec terminal.The map is not really a geographical

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Fallout - Would You Survive a Nuclear War?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/02/2026 à 09:31

In response to a full-scale nuclear attack, America's policy is to spare more populated cities at the expense of the American Heartland. USA Today has published a new interactive map to show you whether you are likely to survive the fallout of such a war.USA Today’s massive investigative project, The Nuclear Sponge, explores a grim strategic reality: how 450 nuclear missile silos scattered

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Introducing GeoCards – A Wiki Labeled Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/02/2026 à 09:47

GeoCards I’ve seen many 'vibe-coded' wiki maps lately. Most follow the same blueprint: they use your location to surface nearby Wikipedia markers. While that works, I wanted a wiki map where the map itself is the gateway. So I built my own wiki map. On GeoCards, every label - from cities and rivers to roads and landmarks - is interactive. Instead of asking 'What’s near me?', GeoCards answers

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Drive Anywhere on Earth

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 31/01/2026 à 09:48

Glenn Explore is a 3D open-world driving game that lets you drive a virtual car anywhere on the planet.Back in the early days of the Google Maps API - when we still called digital mapping "neogeography" - there was a massive craze for building driving games on top of real-world maps. Glenn Explore feels like a love letter to those early days of online mapping.Admittedly, the tech here is a

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American Food Deserts

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 30/01/2026 à 11:15

Millions of Americans live in communities that are both low-income and far from a grocery store. The Institute for Local Self Reliance’s new interactive map shows where grocery access is missing across the United States - and how decades of consolidation in the grocery industry have helped create today’s food deserts.The Grocery Deserts map layers USDA-designated food deserts with the locations

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You can fit 21 Vaticans in San Francisco

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 29/01/2026 à 11:06

According to MarcoAI, San Francisco is roughly 1.8 San Marinos in size. In other words, San Marino would fit approximately 1.8 times into San Francisco’s land area. MarcoAI is the latest “map with an AI” to hit the market. Over the past two to three years, there’s been a noticeable surge in these tools, including Smartmap, Aino AI, and MapsGPT. Together, they form a

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Meet Language Explorer: Google’s New Open-Source Linguistic Atlas

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/01/2026 à 09:23

Google Research's Language Explorer, is a new interactive map that anyone can use to explore the world's languages.Mapping the World’s TonguesThe interface of the Language Explorer is built around a highly responsive interactive map. Users can dive into the data in several ways:Spatial Discovery: You can use the map to zoom into a specific region - like the Highlands of Papua New Guinea or the

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The World's Oldest Globe

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/01/2026 à 10:10

Today, Reddit user u/Brooklyn_University posted an animated GIF of Martin Behaim’s Erdapfel, the world’s oldest surviving terrestrial globe, dating to 1492. As the globe turns, you’ll notice a striking absence: the Americas are nowhere to be found. Sail west from Europe on this map and the first landmass you would expect to encounter is “Cipangu” (Japan).Made in the same year

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The Giant Pixel Art Map of New York

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 26/01/2026 à 09:16

Isometric NYC is a huge pixel art map of New York City - and I mean huge. Anyone who lives in, or knows NYC can spend hours exploring this map, zooming in on their favorite neighborhoods, streets, and landmarks, all reimagined in a classic old-school pixel art style. From iconic skyscrapers to tucked-away corners, Isometric NYC has captured the city block by block in isometric perspective.Of

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Subways Built by Slime Mold

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/01/2026 à 10:00

Subway Sim: Watching a City Think In 2010, researchers in Tokyo ran a slime mold experiment on a map of the city.They placed oat flakes on a map of the Greater Tokyo Area, positioning each flake over a metropolitan center. Then they released a slime mould - Physarum polycephalum - at the location of Tokyo itself.Slime moulds are single-celled organisms with no brain, no nervous system,

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Where is Trump Still Popular?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/01/2026 à 09:19

One year into his presidency, Donald Trump is again breaking records. He is now even more unpopular than at any point in his political career. To mark the first anniversary of his second term, a number of new polls have been released evaluating the president’s popularity across the United States. The Economist's Approval Tracker shows the president's net approval rating at -19%. Using YouGov

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How Big is Big?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 22/01/2026 à 09:25

META is building a massive (AI)-focused data centre in northeast Louisiana. The site footprint is 2,250 acres of land - making the Hyperion Data Center one of the largest data-center construction sites ever attempted in the United States. It is a nearly five-mile-long, one-mile-wide tract of land that is being developed to power Meta’s AI ambitions.It is hard to understand the true scale of a

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